Margriet de Moor - De verdronkene

Betsy broke off and her face went slack, as if the report had suddenly led her to something else. She turned to Nadine and said unsteadily, “Oh, Mrs. Brouwer …”

The latter looked astonished, then showed her understanding of the moment: the silent, awkward turmoil of someone trying to express empathy. She bent forward and closed her hand round the visitor’s wrist.

Three. There were three people in the room, plus an animal that hadn’t yet been heard from, a neutered yellow tomcat that was sitting on the windowseat looking out. Of the three of them, one had a mouth that had suddenly gone dry, eyes that were suddenly swimming and who felt she was a ghost, lucky to be able to see anything at all. Armanda got to her feet, picked up the teapot, and went into the kitchen to brew a fresh supply.

When she returned with it on a tray that also had a plate of open sandwiches with smoked mackerel and mustard, Betsy was saying something that sounded very like a closing remark.

“By the end of the afternoon, there was nothing more they could do.”

“Why?” cried Armanda, coming to a halt in the middle of the room, her voice rising in distress. “Why was there nothing more they could do?”

Betsy stubbed out her cigarette in the full ashtray. It took her some time.

“Because everyone was either saved or drowned.”

For a moment it was still. Then Betsy, with an almost placating look at Armanda, said, “Sjoerd said that the professionals have now taken over. The army and the Red Cross.”

Armanda set the tray down on the table with the greatest care. “The army,” she repeated. “The Red Cross.”

She didn’t sit down with the other two again. Her hands wrapped around a cup of tea, she walked slowly up and down in the front room as she often did when she was thinking or, as now, pulling back into herself because the world gave her little other choice.

Meanwhile the streetlamps had come on, and Betsy made a move to say good-bye to the lady of the house. She had told almost all there was to tell. In three days her brother would take up the continuation of his report himself. At the same, always semimagical hour of the dusk, he would ring the doorbell of number 77. And Armanda, guessing at once it would be him, would run downstairs and open up.

But for the moment things weren’t that far along. For the moment Armanda stood in the darkened front room, almost absent from the other two women, stroking the cat, and thought, as she climbed the first step toward a capacity for empathy, about Lidy. A distant and strange state of being, annotated by the newspaper, presented by the newsreel, and commandeered by the army and the Red Cross. The craziest circumstances, which everyone understood how to report on — except her.

For Nadine and Jan Brouwer had also gone to the southwest this week to search for their daughter. They had managed to reach Schouwen-Duiveland on the boat of a fisherman from what had once been the island of Urk, had learned in the dreadfully damaged little regional capital that their daughter hadn’t remained there on the night of the calamity, also learned that everyone without exception who had been rescued from the polders had been evacuated to terra firma, and by afternoon they were on a lugger from Scheveningen overladen with other refugees on their way to Dordrecht and Rotterdam. Jan Brouwer had already started to take medical care of the people crammed into the hold while they were still in the harbor. Then, barely a few miles out from the canal, the ship steered toward the bank again, from which a sloop had set sail. Fifteen minutes later Nadine saw her husband, a small gray figure on the afterdeck, disappear from view in the churning white wake. It was snowing. Aside from a row of pollarded willows, she could see nothing in the pale distance that suggested a village in which the field hospital was supposed to be, which had appealed for a doctor over the radio.

She reached Dordrecht in the early evening. Failing to find any trace of Lidy among the evacuees in schools and churches, she spent the night on the floor of a post office and went on next morning to the Ahoy Halls in Rotterdam. There too she searched for Lidy for hours in the throng of people that seemed to have adapted itself noisily to a world roofed in glass and steel, with row upon row of stretchers on the concrete floors, coverlets, cushions, cardboard boxes tied up with string, prehistoric suitcases, the occasional well-behaved dog, and an army of helpers, mostly extremely nice women of the sort who always knew what to do no matter what the circumstances, making the rounds with coffee and open-face sandwiches. When she came home around dusk, she was too exhausted to speak. But Armanda, who had barely reached the front door herself, because she had been taking care of Nadja, hadn’t been able to wait, and wanted to know what her mother had seen.

Was she cold, was Armanda’s first question, was she tired? And she had read in her mother’s face that Lidy for the moment had been nowhere to be found. After she had guided her into the warm sitting room, led her to the sofa, taken off her shoes, and waited till she had hugged Nadja and kissed her, Armanda stared at her inquiringly.

When nothing was forthcoming: “I’ve heard there’s looting down there, and people have already been shot.”

Her mother had looked around the room. “Where’s Jacob?”

She hadn’t answered. No one in these days was paying attention to the thirteen-year-old. She said: “An entire cowshed with all the cows still tied up inside is said to have been sucked out to sea on the ebb tide.”

Armanda saw her mother nod thoughtfully. “I read somewhere,” she said, not giving up, “that the atmosphere over some of the islands is so wet that the birds in the air are inhaling water and just drowning on the wing.”

To which Nadine replied that she hadn’t seen that, but she’d seen plenty else.

“In the Hollands Diep …” she began, but then broke off at the sound of the front door closing downstairs. While Jacob came up the stairs whistling a tune, she hastily told Armanda, as if wanting to be done with it as fast as possible, about the flotilla of ships in the snow that had spread out in two directions across the waters, still almost at peak levels.

“And it was so odd,” she said, “suddenly”—she turned her eyes to her son, who had just entered the room—“one of these boats climbed right out of the water and went up this really steep dike, and then drove away quite fast on wheels.”

“An amphibious vehicle” was Jacob’s calm response. “A Detroit United, made by the Americans.”

Later that evening, alone in her room, when she thought back to her mother’s return home, Armanda could make no connection, not even the beginnings of one, between her own days just past and those of her mother. Small-boned, in the gray roll-necked sweater that was soon too warm for her, her mother had sat on the sofa, right on the edge, as if she had to leave again at any moment, and had talked about seeing a ship near Moerdijk coming toward them from the opposite direction and then passing them, with hundreds of coffins piled on deck.

Downstairs in the hall Betsy put on her cap in front of the mirror.

“He also told us,” Armanda heard her say to her mother, “that they spent the night outside the dike. They were allowed to tie up the boat to a fishing smack from Hellevoetsluis that was anchored there with its bow toward the open sea. They were given permission to sleep in the galley, which they did, despite force ten winds, storm gusts, and showers of hail. But shortly after four, the smack tore itself loose as the tide reached its high point, and vanished at high speed, their boat behind it, somewhere on the pitch-dark waters of the Krammer.”